Enhancing digital wellbeing: insights from my conversation with Amy Blankson of the Digital Wellness Institute.

A year ago I wrote a post about the power of taking a digital detox. I had a spent a week’s holiday in Crete with my husband and daughter during which I made the very conscious decision to take a digital break. I planned ahead and gave permission to two colleagues to contact me in the event of any emergencies via text to my personal phone which I checked once a day at 6pm.  The rest of the time the phone, along with my work phone, went into the safe where we were staying. For the entire week we had no TV, no iPad and no other screens.

The difference it made in terms of sleep quality, my ability to be present, my creative thinking and my general quality of life was noticeable and positive, and it did make me think about the need to manage my digital life much more intentionally. (If you’re interested in that post, I’ve added the link in the comments.) 

My recent podcast episode with @Amy Blankson from the Digital Wellness Institute made me think about that holiday and the idea of being intentional about digital wellbeing. Our conversation was all about digital wellbeing, a concept that is relatively new in the wellbeing space, and about why taking care of your digital health matters so much. The pandemic has caused a 30% increase in screen time. Just stop and think about that figure: we are now spending a third more time on our screens than we did before 2020. This increase in digital time has meant a reduction in in-person interactions and more time spent sitting and managing emails, messages as well as the various digital platforms organisations now use to run their business.

Understanding Digital Wellbeing

 So what is “digital wellbeing”? Amy defined it in the following way:

“The opportunity to maximise the benefits of technology while mitigating the harms that come along with it.” 

I really like this definition because it feels real and pragmatic; it understands the fundamental role that tech now plays in all our lives and doesn’t take a simplistic view that tech and the digital space need is automatically a problem. It’s very easy to demonise the digital but we benefit hugely from the tech around us and – quite frankly – most of our day to day lives, both personal and professional, would not function without it. The issue is when we don’t think about how to use it; when we’re not intentional and thoughtful. In short, when it drives us rather than us use it.

 The problem is that it is so ubiquitous and so interwoven into our lives that it can be hard to step back and work out how to use it effectively for the tool that it is, rather than allowing it to control our behaviours. It was an awareness of this which first led Amy to co-found the @Digital Wellness Institute in 2018. She now has the rather wonderful title of Chief Evangelist and she is evangelical about helping organisations understand how digitally well they are and what they need to do in order to ensure that they – and therefore by definition – their people come to a place of “digital flourishing”.

Digital Flourishing

Digital flourishing is a term which draws on the idea of “flourishing” as defined by positive psychology – the idea of living a fulfilling life which allows us to thrive and grow. Amy and her team at the Digital Wellness Institute have developed the “Digital Flourishing Model” which allows individuals and organisations measure their digital wellbeing against eight dimensions to help identify what the Digital Wellness Institute refers to as “that sweet spot where productivity, health, and happiness are most optimised”. It’s a really interesting approach and I’ve put the link to this resource in the comments below in case you’re interested in measuring your own digital flourishing. Understanding where you sit on the various dimensions the model measures then allows you to make the changes which enable you to improve your digital wellbeing.

Digital Overwhelm 

It’s said that we measure what we treasure and the flip side of this is that, if we don’t measure things, we don’t know how to improve them. This is why finding ways to analyse, understand and then take a careful and strategic approach to improving the areas where problems occur is so important. We are living in an age of digital overwhelm and, according to Amy, 83% of employees are now turning to their employers to help them navigate the tech/life balance. However, employers don’t feel equipped to provide this help. Tech use is so fundamentally embedded in businesses that it is hard to see the wood for the trees and to be able to work out what good, and therefore healthy, now looks like. Hybrid and flexible working has exacerbated this by blurring the boundaries between work and home and by making many of us feel like we need to be on call all the time. We often hear talk of the irresponsible use of tech (particularly when we’re talking about teenagers and TikTok) but, in many workforces, there is now an issue of “hyper-responsible tech use” where employees feel they have to be the first to respond to a Slack message, they have to clear their inbox, they must reply to a WhatsApp from their line manager or email from their client regardless of the time it lands on their mobile. We receive, on average, around 237 messages and notifications every day and there’s a real cost to this in terms of wellbeing.

Digital Balance 

This is why it is so important to develop a sense of digital balance, something else Amy and I discussed on the podcast. She defines this as:

·       Screen balance (i.e. time off vs on screen)

·       A sense of digital belonging

·       Having digital boundaries.

It was this latter point which prompted me to take that digital detox last year but talking with Amy helped me understand that digital boundaries are not just about protecting holiday time, a time which absolutely should be sacrosanct. A digital detox works for a short burst but, it’s not only unrealistic to assume you can stay out of the digital space for long periods, there also need to be workable, practical ways of defining and establishing digital boundaries.

These can sometimes be small choices which we make every day. For example, picking up your phone the first time to respond to something, means you are 50% more likely just to pick your phone up in the next two minutes. Each time you pick it up the same thing happens which means there’s a snowball effect which conditions us to pick up the phone and to respond even when we’re not at work. Does this sound familiar? It did to me. We need to start recognising the small choices that we can make each day; small choices or micro habits which don’t seem much on their own but, when put together, impact on our digital wellbeing. Organisations need to change practices, policies and even language to help support employees to make these kinds of choices and so improve their digital wellbeing. Just as we think about working conditions, the benefits we offer, the opportunities for learning and development or what our approach to DE&I is so we, as responsible employers, must think and be intentional about digital wellbeing.

There’s much more in the podcast so do listen to it. The Digital Wellness Institute has some fantastic resources to help in this area and I’ve added a link to those as well to the podcast. I would be very interested in your thoughts on this fascinating conversation and on the subject of digital wellbeing in general. As always, do let me know what you think in the comments.